It's not quite as hot this morning as it was yesterday morning, but the house is getting hotter and hotter. When it's hot like this, what we have to do is get up really early in the morning and open all the doors and windows to let cooler morning air come inside. Most years, we only have to worry about this half-a-dozen times or so.
If we leave the windows open overnight — without screens — we risk getting a lot of insects, including giant moths, and other animals like bats in the house. It's happened to us many times over past hot summers. It's not fun trying to sleep in a room in which a bat is flying around.
Right now, at 6:30, the air in the house is about 5ºF warmer than the outdoor air. For the record, our outdoor thermometer, which is in a shaded, protected spot on the north side of the house, read 33.3ºC at the peak of the afternoon heat yesterday. That's about 92ºF.
I keep losing internet access on our ADSL modem this morning. I wonder if that has to do with the heat. I'll try to post this now before the connection dies again. These are photos I took out on my walk with Natasha yesterday, between 6:30 and 7:00 a.m.
Lovely photos Ken! Tasha sure is a cutie!
ReplyDeleteThanks, C in C. Hope it's not to deathly hot out there in the East Bay this summer.
DeleteMy Puffin browser keeps telling me that my connection is unreliable, and that's right! Orange is lousy.
ReplyDeleteI don't know what is causing the recent internet instability. It will work fine for weeks and months on end and then start acting up when you least expect it.
DeleteHope it cools down for you all. It would only take one bat inside for me to keep the windows closed.
ReplyDeleteThose sure are some glorious skies in your photos today.
When we first had the loft space finished off and opened the windows up there in summertime, we had bats in the room several times. It can be quit and exciting experience. The bats aren't very good at finding their way back outside. Do you remember the bat scene from The Big Chill?
DeleteWe're on SFR and it keeps cutting out during the day, too.
ReplyDeleteOne thing we have done is to hose down the house -- the hose blast doesn't go all the way up, but just enough -- the water on the hot surface pulls the heat from the inside. You can really feel it. It doesn't last long, but it cools the living room for a while.
We just open up the house and let whatever air is flowing flow on through. We do sometimes close the shutters on the west side of the house in the afternoon to keep out direct sun, but I'm not sure how much closing up like that does to reduce the heat.
DeleteShe looks so sweet and small, alone on the road :)
ReplyDeleteI am living in Florida at the moment and I pay too much to keep the place goose bump temperatures.
I look forward to being back in NY where a super hot day is when you have to turn on the a.c.
but thank goodness there IS a.c.
I hope your hot spell breaks !
I think I've understand that you are moving back to NY permanently. No? In NY you need AC a few days out of the year, but you need a good heating system for most of the year.
DeleteThere are inexpensive window screen solutions (some stick on, some magnetic) that work well.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.amazon.com/Foxnovo-Eco-friendly-Self-adhesive-Anti-mosquito-Flyscreen/dp/B00JKBBJ7I
Can Tasha endure the long walks as Callie did? Does she listen to you and not stray? She's seriously cute!
I'll look into those window screens. Thanks. If we keep having these hot summers, we might decide we need them. As I just said to Evelyn, Tasha is very good on our walks. She's curious about the wooded areas around the vineyard, but so far she hasn't strayed into them. She comes when I need to call her back closer to me.
DeleteHow long are your walks with Natasha? We keep several butterfly nets around for critters that our cat brings in. I've never been brave enough to try and catch a bat though- they scare me but they do a lot of good eating mosquitoes and such.
ReplyDeleteTasha's walks are already almost as long as Callie's were at the end. She's good. She stays close, even though she runs wildly up and down rows of vines.
DeleteThis morning at 5, when I was looking out the window at the moonset, I noticed quite a few bats swooping around over the yard. They stayed outside, I'm glad to say. They do help keep the mosquito population down.
That was the problem that we had in the gîte, unfortunately. I couldn't even crack the window open in my bedroom, because there were SO many things flying around right outside the window. It was really uncomfortably hot. If they provided a fan or two, that would have made a world of difference (there was no dish-washing detergent for the kitchen, either -- when I looked, I realized that Doug was washing dishes with rinse agent for the dishwasher... not that there was dishwasher soap, either, or clothes-washing-machine soap... I guess these are issues to ask about when renting a gîte!)
ReplyDeleteBeautiful photos! I hope the hot spell passes quickly!
Judy
As I wrote this morning, the historical average high temperature here in late June and early July is in the mid-70s F, so this weather we've been having is really exceptional.
DeleteAs for the gîte and gîtes in general, they really cater to people who drive in from France and European countries and bring supplies with them. When we stay in gîtes, we take the products you mention with us, and we often take food and wine too so that we don't have to do a lot of shopping and cooking once we arrive. When we went to spend a few days in Burgundy a couple of years ago, I made a big batch of Boeuf Bourguignon and we took it with us in a cooler for our dinners in our gîte there. People take TVs, radios, and of course computers and tablets to their gîtes. I call staying in a gîte "fancy camping."
Lovely photo of Tasha, she's getting to be quite a big girl.
ReplyDeleteWe have mosquito screens built into our window frames - they roll down just like a roller blind, and are essential in the very hot weather. We also have sliding screens with mosquito netting, on our patio (sliding) windows, which we put across the open window. Have you tried those plug-ins which deter mosquitos and flies?
I don't know if you are in France or in the U.S. In the U.S. people definitely have window screens except in very few places. We never had them in San Francisco, where the weather is too chilly year-round for mosquitoes, flies, and other insects to be a problem. It's actually really nice not to have window screens — better views and visibility. I hate those "zappers" that "execute" bugs so you can hear them perish. Gruesome.
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